Honestly, I had this whole post written then clicked the ‘back’ button by accident. Here is the condensed version:

This is not my week.

Paypal stole my money. Well not steal but they are holding it and I have ‘limited account activity’, which means I cannot remove my millions until I prove who I am.

Supposedly trying to withdraw money from PayPal is a ‘dodgy’ activity that is worthy of questioning your identity.

On the Upside this week (It is the kind of week where you need to count upsides):

• I have FINALLY finished my accounting (for now) and can do CUSTOMER WORK AGAIN! YAY!
• Emma is raving about the http://wellington.girlgeekdinners.co.nz/ last night - sounds like an awesome line up of speakers and food.
• I learned how to cook Chicken Rendang and Roti.

Seriously, is it not dodgy that a company can decide whether or not you can withdraw your OWN money? I know it’s for security purposes and I’d be gutted if someone else withdrew my money, but also I wonder if they are just delaying so they can earn interest on MY MONEY.

My dodgy behavior is described as ‘Unusual or potentially high risk’. I am wondering if they think:

a. Having me in charge of any money is high risk because it is coming into winter and I want new stuff.
b. It is unusual for me to have money

Both these are true, but it’s none of their business! If I wanted someone to monitor my spending, I’d ask my mother!

It’s like everyone is out to get you sometimes.

I used to LOVE my laptop, the ability to work from everywhere, how I could carry my business with me, how it was silver and shiny.

Now I’m so over it.

It all began after almost a year of Kelle battling an old, old dyng macbook, we replaced it with a 24 inch desktop mac. She then went back to uni and the 24 inch sat on the desk alone for about 45 minutes before I wandered over to introduce myself and see if we could work together.

And work we have.

Now I don’t need a laptop because I know that if I work at home, I’ll get half as much done because I have half as much room. When I did my accounting marathon, I had 4 windows open on one screen, instead of endlessly closing and opening browsers and notes and documents.

White and shiny is so much prettier than silver and shiny.

and who needs to go anywhere? I have an office.

But seriously, it’s amazing how much more you get done when you have space to move. If you have designers, buy them all one now and they will make you millions with their wizz bang speed.

And completely off topic. Look what I came home and found at my house the other day:

Should I turn this into cuteoverload?

I just took a week off customer work to get our accounts up to date. It wasn’t what I wanted to do this week but I really didn’t have a choice and it made me realise a lot about organisation. I am a VERY organised person normally, I like to keep everything (including my accounts) really simple and up to date. However businesses being as they are, ours never really stood a chance and looking at them was enough to draw a tear to my eye. They were like a complete disaster zone with tonnes of random non- work related expenses running through the company, deposits that didn’t match any invoices, shortcuts that were taken when we were cash poor, all sorts of things that should never have been done and that caused me to waste a week of my life to sort out.

Since I took over the company, I have set everything up afresh to start from scratch so I can leave behind all our legacy mistakes and go forward in a clean, organised way. I’ve got a new bank account, new accountant, new accounts for most things and am ensuring from now on, it’s all done properly. It made me start thinking about people who were just starting up and advice I would give them to get set up.

Get business bank accounts - and USE THEM

DO IT! Don’t start using your personal cards or use a combination. Get one credit card, one eftpos account and one savings account. DO NOT USE ANY OF THESE FOR ANY OTHER REASON THAN BUSINESS. Use your savings account to hold your GST payments based on your monthly accounts so that you never get a fright when it comes to paying it.

Choose a good bank and LIKE YOUR BANK MANAGER. They are there to help and should help (I love mine). Choose a good bank too. I like National Bank because they have a series of talks and seminars tailored to small businesses and also because I like my bank manager.

Get an accounting package

Sign up for an accounting system immediately. I use Xero and although it’s still pretty new, it is definitely getting very slick. Once you have your accounting system, do your accounts weekly. It’s just not worth getting behind, you lose money and waste time. Having your accounts permanently up to date also helps you plan and forecast and see when you may have quiet times and when you may need to look at boosting your sales. Spending a couple of hours a week saves you an entire week later and means you ALWAYS know what shape your business is in.

Talk to the IRD

I didn’t know this, but turns out when ou start a business, you can get someone from the IRD to come and chat to you and explain what your responsibilities are and walk you through our tax system in NZ. It’s a free service so why not? I spent years utterly confused about quite simple stuff because I never took an hour out of my day to sit down with someone and have it all explained.

You can then happily set up your GST payments (GO 2 MONTHLY - if you pretend you can sort yourself out enough to pay every 6 months you are lying to yourself, I know you could be earning interest on that money, but it’s just not worth it.

Get an accountant you like and trust

I’ve known my new accountant for a long time and while the old ones were good (and the main reason for leaving them was to simply have a clean break) it’s quite different having an accountant who you know REALLY cares about your business and who actively offers advice for how to save money, simplify your business and ensure you are not paying too much tax and whos first question is always “how is it all going?”

I would also recommend getting an accounts person who you pay a lot less to help you with your weekly accounts. Initially it’s a good idea to sort them out yourself so you know what you’re doing, but after a while, you are best sticking to what you do best and let someone else sort your financial side and just look at the results.

Get to know a good lawyer

Especially if you are getting into business with someone else (regardless of how well you think you know them) You save heaps of time and money later on if you get the simple stuff sorted initially. Once again, get one you trust and who cares about you (I know it sounds weird but small business is VERY different from big business and work becomes personal and you need to know their top priority is minimising your stress levels). I know when everything is exciting at the start getting all legal on each other seems a bit of a downer, but I know so many examples of people missing the simple stuff and it all ending in tears.

Use iPayroll

Sorry everyone who doesn’t live in NZ, but this is the best online tool I’ve ever found. Actually it’s not even the online tool part. Please overlook the ugly interface and kind of awkward usability (What I’d give to get my hands on it and sort it out!!!), within half an hour of signing up, I received a PHONE CALL from their sales person and am now meeting with them on Monday to run through how it all works. Basically for $9 a week, you enter your timesheets and they do EVERYTHING ELSE from calculating holiday pay to filing your PAYE reports. That’s like the best $9 you’ll ever spend.

The other reason is so that you don’t end up like us and have a year’s worth of overdue PAYE. Just get it sorted from day one, it’s uber simple.

Keep ALL your receipts in a folder

Don’t throw them all in one big box or anything, you often need to access old invoices and receipts especially when you live in New Zealand and both our cellphone companies make dodgy phones that break every 5 minutes. Keep one file for every month. It’s also cleaner and tidier and gives you a zen feeling or organisation.

Get employment contracts for employees

Once again, at the beginning it seems silly, at the end it doesn’t. This gives everyone security and means everything is outlined and everyone is on the same page regarding job descriptions etc.

Which reminds me, stick to your job descriptions. I know small business require a lot of flexibility, but if you hire someone for one reason, don’t start them doing other stuff. They do not own the business and they are there to further their career, not do your odd jobs.

That’s about it for today :) PHEW!

Every time I lose (get rid of?) a customer, I feel a need to blog about it, kind of like a confession, because it’s never nice a pleasant task. So far we’ve had a good run, a few customers who came on at the beginning and who didn’t fit our business any more, one man who embarked on a web project without any idea of what he was doing and completely unreasonable expectations, one massively dis-organised project back in the earlier days that was largely our fault (we did however offer a massive discount) and not a huge amount else. But these guys were just unpleasant.

The Yeller

This customer felt like it was ok to ring me constantly and yell down the phone line. This started when we started having server troubles, which is a nightmare for any web company. However, I did everything I could to sorted, we had me and at least one other person basically full time getting people off the server and keeping it ticking along. Often this was in the middle of the night and well outside of work hours. However, every time one of them called, I accepted full responsibility, told them we were doing everything we could and were aware of the problem and they would be back on track within 10 minutes.

I started to get the impression they just enjoyed yelling at me (this was two separate people within one company)

Then we fixed the server and there were no more problems, so every time their internet connection didn’t work, they STILL called me yelling down the phone, if I didn’t pick up, I checked my messages only to get an ear bashing. It didn’t matter that I’d been totally honest all along especially when it was our fault and that I explained numerous times that now we were accessing their email just fine, they still yelled.

I HATE it when people yell at me. I think I have reached my limit of being yelled at over the past few years and think there is no place for it in business. What do they think? Because they are giving me an ear bashing, I’ll forget all my polite, respectful customers and sort their problems first? I just find it a rude, unpleasant and unnecessary way of dealing with other people. So I told them to go somewhere else (I was actually very polite and just said that I don’t think it was working, they were clearly unhappy and it was probably best for all of us if they went somewhere else).

I thought I’d feel bad, but actually I feel very relieved.

It was kind of funny to contrast it with our hosting company at the time. They were also on standby all the time and helped numerous times trying to sort it out. Even when I was getting an ear bashing, our relationship with our hosting company remained friendly and helpful. I knew they were doing everything they could, they knew I was doing everything I could and we got it sorted. I could have yelled at them, they could have yelled at me, we could have sat there yelling at each other for two weeks straight, but instead we just calmly sorted the problem.

Firstly, I apologise to Xero for my angry behavior on Twitter, I already told you that I treat it like a messanger between friends and was over-exaggerating my anger for effect. I also have a tendency to get angry whenever I do accounting anyway (case in point, when I mentioned accounting this morning, Ben scarpered). So I didn’t really mean to question Xero, I think it’s largely awesome.

Secondly, how cool is it that you guys use Twitter to track what people are saying about you in real-time so when someone like me runs into massive super duper problems that kinda ruins their day, you call them out of the blue and apologise. AWESOME (even if I now feel horrible for writing angry Tweets)

If you have a company, track what people are saying about you on Twitter, from experience, I can guarantee it turns frantic customers into relaxed ones. Especially if you have a web company because a slow web application is a nightmare to deal with and it’s best you know ASAP that people are getting frustrated.

Turns out I’m quite the movie buff. I found this out when going to a dvd shop and walked down the aisle saying ‘wow this one is like the best movie of 2007′, ‘nah that one’s rubbish’, ‘average’, ‘great’… Until I realised there were only about 10 I hadn’t watched and they were either hard core action movies or ‘Bring it on 7′

But The three that have really stuck out for me recently as far as making me realise that building a business is really no big deal and I totally shouldn’t stress are:

1. Amazing Grace

Seriously. You think you’re addicted to your cause (your business?), you think you’ve mad sacrifices, lost friends and battled against overwhelming odds. Toughen up. It’s brilliantly made, totally inspirational and really drums home the fact that amazing feats only happen overnight after 10 years of trying. And when you feel overworked, ignored and like you are banging your head against a brick wall, compare it to these guys who didn’t even plan to make any money in the end.

I reckon it was the best movie I’ve seen since The Life of David Gale for the amount it totally floored me and how much time I have spent since then pondering it and how I can change my life to live by their principles.

2. The great debaters

I have done a little debating in my time and think it was responsible for opening my mind up to the world - when you have to negate ‘that gay couples should be allowed to adopt’ and your first reaction is to be ‘ok, lets just let the other team win’, you have to start really thinking wider and wider about how the world works.

This movie is set in the 1930’s in Southern America and is about a black debate team that ended up taking on Harvard. While this in no way offers any business lessons, the courage and determination displayed against such an overwhelming opposition (and I don’t mean Harvard) and all the different ways that different characters did what they had to do to wake up the next morning and know they were changing their world was powerful. The debates clearly centered around what would become the civil rights movement and were fascinating (if somewhat cheesy on occasion) and left me feeling that growing a successful business is a relatively mundane and easily achievable goal - which is a perspective I lack on occasion :)

3. Once

I LOVED this movie for slightly different reasons. It’s basically a soundtrack to a story and a super awesome idea for a couple of singer songwriters to get their music out there. In this day and age when everyone and their mum has a Myspace profile and is desperately trying to get famous, these guys made a beautiful, charming movie that had you so enthralled you didn’t even know that subliminally they were selling you music, until you arrive at a CD store and HAD to buy the CD (It helps that the songs were really good too). What a super awesome and original approach to marketing! I think they even won an Oscar or something in the end.

So go and buy hire or steal them if you need a little boost and a lot of inspiration… And feel free to share the movies that changed your life in some way last year…

I order all my photos through Digitalmax. It used to be awesome! Cheap photos (like a third of the cost of elsewhere), easyish to use, convenient. Done.

Then they got big (I assume?) did a redesign that makes the site look way prettier but it doesn’t work anymore! I wrote them a polite email in October last year, figuring the least I could do as a usability and interaction person was help out a fellow NZ company with my thoughts… Especially about the photo purchase process which is so badly designed I end up having to go through it at least 3 times every time I order photos and actually gave up between October and now (I thought they may have fixed it) and the fact that their photo editing tools don’t even work for me any more.

I never heard back and the site hasn’t changed. It’s so frustrating to see a company go from causing upheaval in the market to falling behind (All other photo retailers have basically caught up in terms of cost and ease of use). And in several hours, once I finally get this batch of photos printed, they will lose a customer they have had since virtually the beginning.

It’s a real tragedy.

I’ve been thinking a bit about managing my online reputation. Mainly because every time I hear someone talk about how kids these days put such stupid stuff about themselves on the internet and how they are silly to think the internet wont remember it forever… I think about how much stupid stuff I have of me on the internet.

I totally agree that to a certain extent you probably have to control what people see of you, and no I wouldn’t put any of my secrets online (although I did wonder about postsecret because it would be kind of cool to anonymously tell your deepest darkest secret to the world), but I do have a Flickr account that I upload basically all my stupid pictures to without any form of security, I probably could never get a job at Vodafone now because of my online rants, and sometimes I freak out when someone starts following me on Twitter because despite the fact the whole world can view it, I still treat it as a group messenger among close friends.

I’m smart enough to know that when I’m really angry and write a massive rant on this blog, to save it and wait a day before re-reading it and deciding whether or not to publish it. But that and the fact that I don’t really link to my publically viewable accounts is about all the self-censorship I do.

Is this a bad thing?

I don’t think so. I LIKE the fact that my customers get to know me and see me as a person not just a suit (not that they could see me as one anyway because I don’t own one, but you get the point). I talked to someone last night about how his boss is terrified of people finding out how small their business is. Sometimes I wonder what people think of my business. We have a pink door hanger, we have work drinks most nights (or afternoons), we hang out beside the motorway sometimes, just watching the world go past, we’re very small and yes, we live in New Zealand. When I write it like that it feels like a major confession, but actually those are all things I’m PROUD of, it’s what makes us what we are.

If you know my opinion on something like climate change and disagree, I hope that only makes our relationship more interesting, not that you would no longer want to work with me, but seriously, if it has that effect, then it’s probably best that we DON’T work together.

If you know the combined age of our company’s employees is less than 70 and think we can’t possibly have the experience or skill that you require, then that’s kind of sad, but I think our work speaks for itself.

If you think that because you see pictures of me acting like a hooligan with my friends in the weekend, that I’m unprofessional, that’s unfortunate, but some of my best ideas happen when I’m out having a boogie and also I don’t want you to be under any illusion that this company is my life.

So I know that when I have a daughter and she behaves like me on the internet, I’ll have to fight myself to not intervene, but I totally think we go too far sometimes with trying to create online persona’s that are nothing like what we do in real life and the coolest thing about the internet is that even if we never meet, you and I could really get to know each other.

One of my biggest concerns recently has been this massive looming PAYE bill. When we first hired people, we were idiots and forgot to setup PAYE, a year later, I was lumped with this massive potential bill + interest + penalties + you-are-a-bad-person fines. EEK.

So Komal filled out all the forms and we went to the accountant who said potentially they would let us off the bad-person fines but life was not looking rosy. So we sent them in and this morning I bit the bullet and called them to try to get something sorted.

In the first five minutes talking to them, the IRD went from the one organisation I never wanted to talk to, to like my new best friend.

Apart from being super calm and helpful and friendly, they did not make me feel like a bad person (which these days, I find vitally important). And my tax bill was not so frightening… Turns out the bad-people-fines probably only exist if they have to hunt you down instead of you coming forward. So I have set up a payment plan and will slowly sort it out. It was very easy really.

We all complain about the Government and our Taxes and the IRD so much that I think we trick ourselves into think they work against us, not for us. So I just want to thank the nice woman who accepted that we all make mistakes and made it super easy for me to sort out mine. Go the IRD!

Everyone around me is already sick of me raving about how cool Decisive Flow is right now, but I justify my constant glowing reports because I am experiencing something I have never experienced before… An office with no ‘Boss’.

Everywhere I have ever worked, and everywhere I look, there is a chain of command. There is a boss and sub-bosses and sub-sub bosses and people to answer to etc etc. I know a lot of young people who are just starting their careers and who have incredible ideas that get shot down because they are not at the right rung on the ladder, and everyone I know is all excited about reading ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’ because they believe it will give them a way to getting their boss to listen to them without risking ego-reduction backlash.

This strikes me as a really unproductive way to run a company and that combined with the fact that I never got into business to manage people lead me to always want to create a working environment where everyone is equal and everyone is the boss of their own stuff. I was starting to think this kind of Utopia was impossible until I woke up a week ago and realised that despite me having been on holiday half of January, and despite having just hired someone new and despite letting everything go a little slack… All our projects were being delivered early and Emma and Kelle both know their parts of the business so well I literally don’t even have to look over anything unless I am interested in it or they ask me to.

I’m really interested in how this happened so I can replicate it, because now I know how cool it is to work like this, I would HATE to go back. These are the key factors:

1. Have faith in other people. When I was exhausted at the end of last year (before I spent half of January holidaying ;)), the best piece of advice I got was to give other people in your company as much as they can handle. I know it sounds simple, but seriously, I’m constantly surprised with what those two can do.

2. But first, make sure you have people you can trust. Trust is very fragile and when it is broken badly, you wont fix it. I must say I find trust the hardest because I have been badly let down before. I think the best way to establish trust is through honesty. Especially when there are so few of you, you either ensure sleepless nights worrying about everything, or sit people down and tell them what is on your mind and give them the chance to let you know what they think of your expectations. But you HAVE to trust them or they simply can’t work with you and I know in New Zealand at least, letting employees go gets very complicated and expensive but seriously, if you can’t trust someone, nothing will work without it and you will forever have to second guess them and double-check their work and this cycle only spirals downward.

3. Do group activities. I want to do paragliding, but it’s not actually about that. It’s about the fact you all have to work together so knowing each other quite well helps ensure you don’t accidentally offend each other and that you figure out how each of you ticks so when someone is having a bad day you can carry their load. The biggest thing though, is that this leads to co-operation. While I’m not necessarily sold anymore on the idea of working with friends, there is a difference between jumping into a company with your best mate, and becoming friends with the people you work closely with. When you are friends, you want to co-operate, you WANT to help each other. Liking each other is a really good motivation for getting stuff done and because people want to do stuff for each other, you don’t have to tell them to do it, you all just take the bits that fit you best and everyone is their own boss.

4. Give people responsibility for their own stuff. We’re lucky, we work on different projects and each of us is responsible for getting our own projects finished. I know at the end of the day, it is my ear that will take the verbal bashing if a project goes astray. But if you trust the people you work with, you know they will let you know about a problem well before the customer does and give you time to work together to fix it. The biggest complaint I hear about jobs is not the pay, its the ability to own your own work, to be given something to do and the trust that you can do it. A lot of bosses can’t stop themselves from overruling the people they work with if they think their idea is better, what they don’t realise is as much as their idea may be different and equally as good, the other one will work too. Especially in small business, people find it hard to let go. I find it exciting that when we all own the direction of the business, we have three times as much skill and experience determining where we head, even if it is not necessarily where I would have gone alone.

Workplace Utopia is not a myth

I know it seems a little extreme, and I know, at the end of the day, if everything falls apart, I will be the one assuming control, but why would it fall apart?

I genuinely don’t like the idea of crazy hierarchies in small businesses, I think that is why a lot of them fail and why people leave them. They generally don’t work anyway because the person who owns the company didn’t get into business because they were amazing with people, they got in it because they had an idea and probably because they don’t like to take orders from other people. These are not the right types of people to start bossing other people around.